13 Replies - 3804 Views - Last Post: 23 April 2011 - 10:13 AM

Which programming language cost to write in?

Posted 13 April 2011 - 08:28 AM

Dear following members of DIC,

Today I went to a book-store. There I found a couple of interesting books about C# and .NET framework and then I got a bit wondering: does the tool for writing in C# and .NET framework cost? I ask the personal. After a bit of blinking, he asked Google. Sadly he typed in a search phrase for updates for Microsoft Visual Studio and I did not want to hurt his feelings by pointing out his error. I found two other interesting books that I bought so the guy behind the counter was still happy. (Vista inside/out and stage to stage learning of Access 2007, around 7 $ US each).

Now, that was the background. My question to you follow members :

Which language does it cost a fee, like buying software to develop program? As an exemplar Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 which seems to be starting at 500 $ US.

Re: Which programming language cost to write in?

Posted 13 April 2011 - 08:53 AM

POPULAR

Standard resources, references and suggestions for new programmers.
I am going to guess that you are trying to teach yourself C# without much guidance, a decent book or without knowing where to look. Sometimes just knowing where to look can make all the difference. Google is your friend.
Search with either "C#" or "MSDN" as the first word: "MSDN Picturebox", "C# Custom Events", "MSDN timer" etc.

But honestly, just typing away and seeing what pops up in Intellisense is going to make your self-education take 20 years. You can learn by trying to reverse engineer the language through banging on the keyboard experimentation - or you can learn by doing the tutorials and following a good "How to learn C#" book.

May I suggest picking up a basic C# introductory book? There are so many great "How do I build my first application" tutorials on the web... There are dozens of "Learn C# in 21 days", "My first C# program" type books at your local book seller or even public library.

Build a Program Now! in Visual C# by Microsoft Press, ISBN 0-7356-2542-5
is a terrific book that has you build a Windows Forms application, a WPF app, a database application, your own web browser.

C# Cookbooks
Are a great place to get good code, broken down by need, written by coding professionals. You can use the code as-is, but take the time to actually study it. These professionals write in a certain style for a reason developed by years of experience and heartache.

Have you seen the 500+ MSDN Code Samples? They spent a lot of time creating samples and demos. It seems a shame to not use them.

Let me also throw in a couple tips:

You have to program as if everything breaks, nothing works, the cyberworld is not perfect, the attached hardware is flakey, the network is slow and unreliable, the harddrive is about to fail, every method will return an error and every user will do their best to break your software. Confirm everything. Range check every value. Make no assumptions or presumptions.

Take the extra 3 seconds to rename your controls each time you drag them onto a form. The default names of button1, button2... button54 aren't very helpful. If you rename them right away to something like btnOk, btnCancel, btnSend etc. it helps tremendously when you make the methods for them because they are named after the button by the designer.btnSend_Click(object sender, eventargs e) is a lot easier to maintain than button1_click(object sender, eventargs e)

You aren't paying for variable names by the byte. So instead of variables names of a, b, c go ahead and use meaningful names like Index, TimeOut, Row, Column and so on

Re: Which programming language cost to write in?

Why bother spending money on books for vista or office 2007?
These are both years out of date. Nobody who has a choice uses Vista: It's that bad. One either goes back to XP or forward to Win7.

Wouldn't you rather learn what people are using today? Windows 7 and Office 2010?

tlhIn`toq, As far I know and have tried, 7 is build on Vista. The control panel for example, to my knowledge, looks pretty much the same. I prefer XP over Vista or 7 any day (I would need to buy a new desktop and a new laptop and new printers to make it work and yes, I have tried 7 on the machinery I have today - it does not work). I wish only to have an idea of what to look for, the names and such. Yes, Office 2010 is the next step, but I have 2007 and I do not wish to upgrade to 2010. I see no reason to it. The layout seems pretty much out the same. I went on a course in basic use of Office 2010. I did not notice any difference.

Re: Which programming language cost to write in?

It doesn't cost a penny to write code in C# or any .NET language. It costs money for Microsoft's IDE. Nonetheless, there are free versions of that IDE available as well.

, thank you. Very good to know.

Raynes, on 13 April 2011 - 08:49 AM, said:

There are free alternatives to Visual Studio such as SharpDevelop, but you do not need an IDE to write code for a .NET language in any case.

I shall look up SharpDevelop. More of curiosity then need.

Raynes, on 13 April 2011 - 08:49 AM, said:

Furthermore, I'm not sure asking the guy behind the counter at a book store for programming advice is a terribly bright idea.

No, it was not. But it can't hurt . Then again, it is seldom I go out and even more seldom that I go to an actual store. I prefer Internet and Internet based store. Maybe because I have autism (Asperger syndrom) .

Re: Which programming language cost to write in?

Posted 13 April 2011 - 09:18 AM

7 is not built on Vista. It does use a lot of GUI so the user can feel familiar. But beyond that... Vista fails horribly in so many areas that worked fin in XP such as networking, driver installation and so many other "under the hood" areas.

As someone that programs for a living I can tell you our company supports XP and Win7. We completely skipped support for Vista and refuse to write for it. It's that screwed up internally.

For many reasons (mostly GUI) I would stick with XP as well. But that's hardly a realistic choice if I want to earn a living and continue to put food on the table. Today's computers roll out with Windows7. That is what the customer base is using. Win7, multi-core, with at least 4gig of RAM. Once you are past the learning stage and looking to earn a living with your programming you will have to bite the bullet and buy a machine that is overpowered for the modern user. If the average PC is 4 core and 4 gig RAM then you'll need something bigger so you can have that much in resources free, above and beyond the consumption of your IDE. That's just the reality of doing this for a living.

The best investment I can suggest is multiple monitors and VMware.
Program development eats screen real-estate like a PacMan eats dots and ghosts.
VMware will let you debug in multiple OSes on the same machine. Your host can be Win7x64 yet Visual Studio can send the debug to a WinXPx32 virtual machine. This is another reason you want a beast of a development PC. It is still a lot cheaper than building 5 other user-quality PC's for testing.